Image Dissectors

Month Roundup: January 2010

January was the month Mark Thompson was made to earn his £800,000 a year. There's been opposition to his seemingly unspendable salary for some time now, but for Mark, this month must have seemed like one continuous argument about how much he takes home. The month began as it meant to go on with PD James collaring him on the Today Programme, and castigating him for paying his executives too much.

Somehow the people who are doing the creative work, who are making the programmes, don't receive this largesse - it seems to be a huge great waste of middle management, a bureaucracy which it's very difficult indeed to justify.

Thompson was left stammering and stuttering. He probably wasn't expecting an 89 year old woman to be quite so sharp at 8 o'clock in morning, the day after new year's eve. He certainly wasn't on top form. This was great for The Telegraph though, which had a bit of a field day with this one, commenting and quoting it extensively.

The month only got worse from here, when poor old Mark got another grilling, this time from his own staff. "Your salary is wrong and corrosive", Steven Sackur of the inexplicably capitalised HARDTalktold the DG. He said that before the interview he had received hundreds of eMails from staff complaining about executive pay. After the interview, Thompson was left rather deflated, saying, "if someone says it's time for me to go ... well, I won't bore you any longer". This prompted The Guardian to wonder what would happen when Thompson does stop boring us.

Thompson's main argument throughout has been that you have to pay large salaries to get the best staff, and that in real terms his salary has gone down (presumably explaining why he had to claim for a 70p parking ticket). The response to this is that working in the public sector is a privilege. Consequently, staff should expect lower salaries than their private brethren. This argument has continued, with pretty much no expansion, for the last few months. Archie Norman, the new ITV chairman gave the knife a little bit of a twist when he pointed out that if the big salaries had recruited all the best people, why had he, someone with no media experience at all, bagged the top job at ITV.

In a month when I began probably the most in depth discussion of Hyperlinks ever, The Guardian made a selection of over the top claims about links calling them "right for democracy" and "a tool for accountability [...] the keystone to free speech online." I, of all people, don't want to play down the role of the link in shaping the Internet, but calling it "a right" and the cornerstone of democracy is going a bit far. On the subject of democracy, something else that was revealed not to be the cornerstone of it was VoxPops, everyone's right to "not have a clue what you're taking about", according to The Guardian.

The 16th of January saw the launch of the SarcMarc - a new typographical symbol for illustrating sarcasm that everyone forgot about almost immediately. While this may have been useful for improving Anglo-American relations ("Jeez, I finally understand those Brits"), you had to pay to use it, rendering it an almost instant failure.

And finally, there was bad news for Hollywood. Tesco may be adding films their Value range, as they announced they would invest in feature films.

Oh, and Steve Jobs attempted to save the publishing industry by making a really big iPod Touch. Whether this will do for the novel what the MP3 did for the album is anyone's guess. As is how creating a device that will no doubt encourage literary piracy will "save" an industry that's doing pretty well at the moment.